Almost-concordance of knots in aspherical 3-manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, we study topological concordance modulo local knotting, or almost-concordance, of knots in 3-manifolds $M\neq S^3$. A. Levine, Celoria (arXiv:1602.05476v4), and Friedl-Nagel-Orson-Powell (arXiv:1611.09114v2) conjecture that, absent the presence of an embedded dual 2-sphere, any free homotopy class $x$ of knots in $M$ contains infinitely many concordance classes modulo the action of the concordance group of knots in $S^3$ by local knotting. We develop a method for confirming this conjecture for any nontrivial class $x$ in any aspherical $M$ and provide computations that prove the conjecture in a large family of open cases. Our technique employs an extension of Milnor's link invariants to knots and links in non-simply-connected 3-manifolds (arXiv:2310.10918v2). We exhibit a large family of examples where, in a precise sense, we maximize the number of almost-concordance classes distinguished by these invariants.